Juice Bar with a Cause Coming to the Bayview

The new building at 5600 Third Street; photo by Daisy Chow.

Future entrance to Get Fresh Juice Bar and Café; photo by Daisy Chow.

If all goes well, a new juice bar/café will be joining the growing roster of food venues coming to Third Street in the Bayview, this one with a community-minded goal: youth development agency Hunters Point Family (HPF) plans to open ~GET FRESH JUICE BAR AND CAFÉ~ at 5600 Third Street this fall. Local youth from HPF’s Girls 2000 program will run the café, selling juices, salads, sandwiches, and fresh produce they’re growing on their nearby organic community garden, which was recently made over with the help of chef Michael Mina.

Get Fresh will occupy two adjoining, street-level retail spaces in the newly constructed Armstrong Townhomes, a mixed-use development that includes senior apartments and urban townhomes. According to HPF Executive Director Takai Tyler, they’re waiting for approval for funding from SF Redevelopment for the buildout. Meanwhile, an advisory board of local restaurant and business owners are working with the teenage girls on skills such as recipe development. They also have plans to run a test kitchen over the summer.

On Saturday May 21st, the project’s organic garden got a big helping hand from Michael Mina and 75 restaurant staffers, who volunteered to spend the day pulling weeds, pruning trees, turning dirt, and planting seedlings at the half-acre plot in the Alice Griffith community. (Chefs from Mina’s restaurants prepared lunch for all.) Mina’s restaurants will purchase some of the produce after the harvest, providing an income source for HPF. The garden also provides organic produce to the local community through HPF’s food pantry and at neighborhood farmers’ markets.

Cheers to Mina and staff, as well as collaborators Urban Strategies and HOPE SF, for supporting such a great community project. (You know from the socialite section that our local chefs and restaurants are constantly making us proud with their generosity.) Plus it sounds like the juice bar/café will be a more healthful alternative to the building’s other incoming retail tenant, Wingstop, a franchise whose Oakland and Emeryville locations boast soda machines with 106 flavors.